The present invention relates to a device for disentangling and spreading short steel fibers which are intended to be used for the reinforcement or crack prevention of concrete or mortar prepared for civil engineering works, building constructions or the like. The material with which the fibers is used will generally be referred to herein as concrete, that term being understood to include other similar materials.
Recently, methods of reinforcement or crack prevention of concrete have been developed which include the use of short steel fibers mixed into the concrete. Such short steel fibers are needle-shaped and are available on the market by the common name of steel fibers. It is necessary to evenly spread such fibers on the concrete during the mixing period in order to evenly mix these fibers into the material. The above-mentioned short fibers, however, by their very nature, tend to form a generally agglomerated mass where the fibers are entangled with each other. The tendency to agglomerate is enhanced during transportation and other handling of these fibers. Accordingly, no efficient device has yet appeared, even though automation of short fiber spreading is highly desired, because of the difficulty of disentangling the mass of the fibers in advance in order to spread them on the unset concrete.